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I am grateful for Eric Uslaner's thoughtful review of my book. The exchange between us highlights for me, above all, the benefits of reading and conversing across disciplinary boundaries. Uslaner correctly notes that my book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. My aim was to understand corruption in Nigeria as it is experienced by ordinary citizens, rather than to contribute to Western analytical debates about (possibly) more universal aspects of corruption and its consequences. But I certainly acknowledge and accept that my own analysis and understanding (as well as the larger contribution of my book) would have benefited from a deeper engagement with the political science literature on corruption. I would quibble with his contrast between anthropologists' “stories” and political scientists' “data.” To me, real people's lives and narratives are among the most powerful data in the social sciences—but that is why I am an anthropologist.

Eric Uslaner's ambitious book argues that—across a wide range of countries and contexts—the fundamental underlying engine and explanation for corruption is inequality. Mustering an array of sources, including survey data, comparative literatures, and personal anecdotes, Uslaner makes a compelling case that the faith often placed in relatively simplistic institutional changes as a means for combating corruption is misguided. Such approaches ignore the deeply embedded economic and social underpinnings of corruption, which, he argues, are tied less to political institutions (narrowly conceived) and more to systematic inequality and the economic and cultural processes that support it.

This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural–urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollections of marriage during the war. The intense identification of migrant Igbos with place of origin and the importance of ‘home’ and ‘home people’ are situated in the context of the legacy of Biafra. The importance of kinship relationships for access to patron–client networks is linked to the Igbo perception of marginalization in the wake of Biafra. Igbo ideas about the significance of reproduction and the vital importance of ‘having people’ are reinforced through collective memories of Biafra. Igbo people's conceptions of Nigerian politics, their understandings of the social and economic importance of kinship and community in contemporary Nigeria, and even their reproductive decisions can be better explained by taking into account the legacies of Biafra.

In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town's nouveaux riches were responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of ‘fast wealth’. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central position of pentecostal Christianity in popular interpretations of the riots. While pentecostalism itself fuelled local interpretations that ‘fast wealth’ and inequality were the product of satanic rituals, popular rumours simultaneously accused some pentecostal churches of participating in the very occult practices that created instant prosperity and tremendous inequality. The analysis explores the complex and contradictory place of pentecostalism in the Owerri crisis, looking at the problematic relationship of pentecostalism to structures of inequality rooted in patron-clientism and focusing on the ways in which disparities in wealth and power in Nigeria are interpreted and negotiated through idioms of the supernatural.

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